


Chaos Theory

by tentacledicks



Category: Watch Dogs (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Characters Meet While In Captivity, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-05
Updated: 2020-09-05
Packaged: 2021-03-05 06:26:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25346170
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentacledicks/pseuds/tentacledicks
Summary: First, he screws up his Star Wars joke and probably loses Wrench's respect forever (or until the next time Wrench remembers he has the collector's edition of the Alien movies at his house.)Then, some asshole in a suit rolls up on the game shop and threatens to kill everyone—as if that wasn't the reason Marcus told him a fake location in the first place. And as if that wasn't enough, when he's up on this rickety scaffolding outside of the dam, doing his best to get information on this dude Anton while dodging bullets from hissupposedally, he gets tazed and drugged by some Bratva he didn't catch in time.He can't catch a break.
Relationships: Jordi Chin/Aiden Pearce
Comments: 15
Kudos: 50
Collections: Alternate Universe Exchange 2020





	Chaos Theory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Requiem](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Requiem/gifts).



He dragged himself out of unconsciousness with effort, the pounding terror of being caught warring against the sluggishness in his limbs. His first thought was ‘taser’ but his second thought, hot on its heels, was ‘drugs’. Getting tazed was a memorable experience. Cottonmouth wasn’t one of the side effects.

The strange, warped sound of voices finally resolved into something more normal as Marcus rolled onto his side and peeled his eyes open. Suit guy was standing up at the bars of a jail cell (the cell they were both locked in, Marcus realized after a second, because of _course_ he had the misfortune of being stuck in a concrete box with this dude) arguing in low tones with someone out of his view. He groped around on the ground until his fingers found the familiar shape of his glasses, then shoved them onto his face.

Suit guy came into focus, his hands jerking and weaving as he hissed out, “From where _I’m_ standing, you have no fucking room to talk, Pearce.”

Wait. Pearce?

“I was in the middle of the shit, Jordi. And it still took a dozen of them to take me down. What’s your excuse?” The dry, gravely tones came from the man seated in the cell across from them, hat pulled low over his face and a heavy leather trench coat hanging over his shoulders. Marcus had never heard any of the supposed recordings of the Vigilante but—

“I was babysitting, fucking sue me. You _know_ , if you’d just fucking told me you were in San Fran, I’d have looked you up instead of strong arming this kid into working for me. With me. Whatever.” Suit guy (Jordi, apparently) glanced back at him, a sneer working its way onto his face when he noticed Marcus was awake. “You’re so fucking bad at this, you know that?”

“Man, you kept shooting down my fucking drones, I don’t know what you want from me,” Marcus muttered, sitting up straight. His pockets were empty, his bag missing, and it felt like he’d lost his hat at some point too. From this angle, he could see the Vigilante’s face a little easier, green eyes glittering from the shadows. “So… where the fuck are we?”

“Bratva hideout,” Aiden said. “I was checking out a deal between them and the Auntie Shu, tracing an old lead from the auction in Chicago, and I stumbled right into a trap. Punished them for the trap, but that didn’t get me very far. What’s your name, kid?”

“Who gives a shit what his name is, I’m not dying in some fucking Russian pit,” Jordi muttered, not moving from his spot against the bars of his cage.

“Marcus,” he said, just to be a dick. It was surreal, talking to _the fucking Vigilante_ like they were just buddies or something. “We uh—Bratva guy named Anton. They locked down the hospitals with ransomware, so I was trying to find them and then this guy showed up.”

“Pointed his gun at you, didn’t he?” A tiny smile quirked over Aiden’s face before fading again at the loud clunk of a door opening. He shifted back into the darkness of his cell, which was just uncanny in a way Marcus really wasn’t comfortable with.

His cellmate had absolutely no intentions of doing the same. He was up against the bars, kicking one of them as he raised his voice and said, “Alright, this is annoying and I want to talk to your goddamn boss. Do you know who I am? You are in _deep shit_ , buddy.”

Marcus opened his mouth to ask what the _fuck_ he was doing but the tiniest shake of Aiden’s head had him shutting it again. The two of them had some kind of plan, one they must have hashed out while Marcus was still unconscious. Not that he was sure how this was gonna go, but if it needed him to be quiet, he could be quiet. Damn, he wished he had his stun gun on him. Didn’t feel good going into this without a way to defend himself.

“I mean it,” Jordi continued crabbily, “I get paid a lot of money, and I mean a _lot_ of money, to take care of way more dangerous people than _you_. Like, you’re fucking small fry. You’re absolute trash. And you think you can keep me in here?”

“Oh yeah? And what are you going to do about it?” The Bratva sneered, spreading his arms wide as he stepped out of Jordi’s reach. Behind him, Aiden unfolded off his seat, moving silently across the cell. “You’re in there and I’m out—”

An arm snaked around his throat as Aiden’s other hand caught the phone in the Bratva’s hand, yanking it free. His thumb flicked over the screen, the cell door unlocking as Marcus watched with his heart in his throat, his own hands frozen. He felt like he should be _doing_ something, but he was straight fucking trapped in here with a different kind of predator, and nothing he said now would stop the Vigilante from slipping out of his cage and beating a man down in front of him.

“Dude. _Dude_. I think he got it,” he finally managed to squeak out. The Bratva was still breathing and that was the only thing keeping Marcus going right now because _holy fucking shit_. He did _not_ need to be an accessory to this. Not after the hell that was scaling the dam with some sociopath shooting explosive barrels and people the whole time. “Can you get us out now?”

Aiden straightened up, head tipped to the side slightly. There was a look on his face, amused and pitying and condescending all at once, but he didn’t say anything, which was good because Marcus _might_ have thrown a punch for that. Having a sense of morality wasn’t a fucking _weakness,_ damn it.

After wiping his baton off, Aiden finally deigned to open the cell door. Jordi exploded out in a flurry of motion, his sour voice dipping and weaving over some rambling bullshit (dude truly never shut up, Marcus hadn’t thought anyone could give Wrench a run for his money and _then_ ) while Marcus pushed himself up a little more slowly. He was still a little wobbly on his feet, especially with a dull headache kicking up behind his eyes, but not too terrible. Good enough for government work, at least.

His stuff was piled on a small crate just out of view from the cells. Marcus headed that way, grabbing his hat and pulling it on before stuffing his wallet and thunderball in his pockets. The laptop wasn’t broken, though his flying drone was a bust, and the stun gun was out of charges it looked like. Not the worst possible scenario, but not exactly his favorite one either. At least it was something he could work with.

“ _Why_ are you sitting down?” Jordi snapped, starting to stalk back towards his little crate-turned-table. Marcus ignored him, flipping the laptop open and checking to see where the closest ctOS access point was. Like hell was he letting this whole situation go to waste.

“Because we’re at a Bratva location and just because this guy’s smart enough to lock down his _computers_ doesn’t mean he’s smart enough to lock down his _location_. There’s a ctOS box just outside the door and I need to reach it. Can you, like, _not_ kill anyone on my way there?” He scooped his laptop up, cradling it close to his chest, then glared at Jordi where he was bristling with offense.

A quiet snort broke the tense silence between them.

“We’ll handle the guards,” Aiden said, reaching out to tug Jordi away. “You get in, get what you need, and then head for the exit. We’ll meet you outside and go from there.”

_We?_ Marcus wanted to ask, but he wasn’t going to risk losing the one person on his side right now. For whatever reason, the Vigilante seemed to know the terrifying suit guy; more importantly, he seemed able to get a _handle_ on him, handing the guard’s gun to Jordi before opening the door and bringing his tactical baton down on someone’s head just outside.

Jesus.

He gave them a minute before moving out himself, carefully stepping over the unconscious (but still breathing, thank _fuck_ everyone was still breathing) bodies between him and the small office tucked behind a thick steel door. The ctOS box was located there, clearly fucked around with by someone else who hadn’t been quite so good at closing it back up. It was easy enough to plug in, access the local network for the bunker itself, and then go digging back in the records stored here. Not a whole lot that was relevant to him but there _was_ a fragment of a text conversation that Marcus could follow back to a group email referencing a party on a yacht. Bodies needed for security, because Anton was paranoid.

“Got you,” he said softly, unplugging his laptop and standing up again. There were more bodies on the stairs leading up, all of them with heartbeats when he stopped to check. Aiden was keeping to Marcus’s desperate plea, and whatever bizarre hold he had over Jordi was staying firm. At least _someone_ knew how to handle the crazy fucker.

They were waiting for him on the ground floor, arguing in low tones again next to an idling SUV. The driver’s side door was open, Aiden half in and half out, Jordi’s arm braced against the roof as he leaned in close to snap something too quiet for Marcus to hear. If it had been anyone else, he might make a crack about the sexual tension. Considering that it was a pair of the most violent men he’d ever met, he kept his snark to himself. Wrench would appreciate the joke later. Probably.

“Yo, I know where Anton is,” he said, giving Jordi a wide berth as he headed for shotgun. “A yacht, out in the middle of the bay. He’s throwing a party tonight. If we get headed that way now, we might actually make it there on time.”

“I was gonna blow up that yacht,” Jordi muttered, swinging into the backseat. Putting him at Marcus’s back. Fuck, maybe he should’ve taken the backseat instead.

“Well, I need the password to the ransomware, so don’t? At least, don’t do anything too crazy until I can get that access.” He glanced at Aiden, who was plugging in a marina address. “Anton is pretty good at what he does. It might take me a minute to get into his systems.”

“Jordi and I can take care of the rest of the men on the yacht until then,” Aiden said, gravelly voice low and easy. Somehow, he was the calmest person in the car right now and Marcus wasn’t sure how to deal with that.

“Can we get ice cream on the way?” Jordi asked, shooting Marcus a nasty grin when he made an involuntary noise of dismay.

“No,” Aiden said.

As uncomfortable car rides went, it was pretty fucking high up there. Marcus could begrudgingly admit that Aiden was pretty damn good at driving, better with the SUV’s handling than he would have been, but he had the room to notice other things without the road to worry about—the way Aiden’s phone was a patch behind DedSec, the focus on violence as he kept up idle chatter with Jordi (why did they know each other so well?), the wear and tear on his jacket and the circles under his eyes. The Vigilante was something of an idol to DedSec, because he’d been… not the first, not when _Raymond Kenney_ was propped up with a beer in the basement of the games shop, but the second. The big one. Ray took down the ctOS prototype but Aiden proved that the new version wasn’t any good either.

Not that it had helped much, in the long run, but he’d done it. And the more Marcus looked at him, the more that pedestal tarnished. He guessed it was better to see it like this than running into an old hacker doing drugs in the desert, but he hadn’t expected Aiden to be a petty criminal. Ray was living up to the legend. Aiden really wasn’t.

“But seriously, there’s an ice cream shop not even a two minute walk away,” Jordi said as he climbed out of the car, heading for the back of it where his _fucking gun_ was. Christ, he really did love pointing that thing at people.

“Man, can you focus? Just a little?” 

Jordi sneered at him, then prowled around the car to follow Aiden down towards the docks. Even from this distance, the yacht was visible out on the water, its light brilliant in the dim twilight darkening around them. Marcus reached for his phone out of habit, then hesitated. He’d told Josh he’d handle it but it had been at least four hours since Jordi first showed up in the games shop. Was it better to give them an update now or wait until the whole thing was done? If he told Sitara he was about to get up to some stupid shit (and this was the stupidest shit he’d gotten up to in a _while_ ) she wouldn’t be happy about it. Might even bring in the big guns and call Horatio up to yell at him too.

It could wait. Once he was done and free and clear, he’d have a great story to swap over pizza and maybe a reason to get a hug from Wrench. And then he would never, ever have to think about the seedy underbelly of the gangs around here again, could leave all this shit behind and _not_ think about the squishy crunch of a bullet splattering a man’s skull against a concrete barrier.

He left his phone in his pocket and climbed down on the boat, settling himself in and craning his head around to squint at the yacht. In the front, Aiden carefully navigated the boat away from the dock while Jordi stood up, one hand cupped over his eyes as he braced against the windshield of the boat. Neither of them seemed to have any problem with the spray, which was just fantastic when Marcus was sitting here wondering if he’d get a chance to clean his glasses before going in.

As they drew closer to the yacht, the thump of heavy electronic music rang out over the water. There was a DJ on the boat somewhere, calling out track listings before spinning up the next song, the whistles and cheers of the very drunk partygoers covering the sound of the engine as Aiden took them on a smooth curve around the prow and drew up to a small platform on the side of the yacht. A ladder led up to one of the upper decks, but the platform opened up to an interior hallway as well. As good a spot as any.

Marcus climbed off, wobbling a little when the boat started to drift, then held his hand out to help the next person on. He regretted it almost immediately when Jordi’s grip nearly unbalanced him again, his dry voice sarcastic as he said, “You’re _so_ polite, dork. Try not to get yourself killed while we handle the guards.”

“Yeah, yeah, I got this. _Don’t_ kill Anton until I have what I need, okay?” He made a face at Jordi’s back as the assassin slipped down the hallway, flinching when Aiden dropped a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Are you guys going to be good?”

“We’ll be good,” Aiden said, the corners of his eyes creasing with amusement as he smiled slightly. “I’m not as skilled at it as you, but if you need backup on the hacking, just call.”

“Yeah, alright. I’ll do that.” He waited for Aiden to disappear down the hallway too, then settled into the shadows under the ladder. The water wasn’t rough enough to slosh up over the deck yet and this way he’d be able to keep an eye on both approaches. Just in case the guards got ideas.

Showtime.

“Hey, Josh,” Marcus said softly, pulling up a private line. He’d hit the main DedSec channel later. “I’m about to get into Anton’s system, trying to see if I can find that password. Can you remote in and tell me if I’m fucking up?”

“One second.” On his screen, his mouse twitched before stilling again. “I’m in. Pull up the cameras and see what the access points are like. I doubt it’s going to be that easy.”

“No kidding,” he muttered, breaking into the much less secure camera network on the yacht. There was a safe room on the yacht somewhere, and in that safe room was Anton’s main server rack. If anywhere was going to have the password Marcus needed, it would be there. If he was _lucky_ , he wouldn’t have to get a hard line to it.

Josh was mercifully quiet in his ear, the soft click of his keystrokes the only sound coming through. It meant Marcus could strain his ears for the sound of guards coming around, trying to ignore the sight of a dead man when he flipped to a camera over a room that Jordi had clearly hit already. There was a soft, sharp indraw of breath, but Josh didn’t ask. Which was good. Marcus would give him the rundown later, when it was a little less present.

Then he flipped to a camera and watched Jordi slam a man’s face into a sliding glass door until he stopped moving, and he couldn’t stop himself from saying, “What the _fuck_ , man.”

“That’s the guy from the game shop,” Josh said neutrally, only the slight wobble in his voice giving him away.

“Yeah, I know. I had to go with him to make him leave everyone alone and we just sort of ended up here when we found out where Anton was.” A different camera, this time to Aiden using his tactical baton to break a guard’s arm, then his neck, slamming him down on the ground before the alarm could ring out. “This is not being _good_.”

“That’s Aiden Pearce. Why is Aiden Pearce on Anton’s yacht?”

“It’s… a long story, Josh. He’s with us. Me. He’s with me. I’ll tell you the whole thing when I get back to the hackerspace, because this has been one _fucked up_ day, let me tell you.” A final access point, and then—

“Shit.”

“God _damn_ it, this is not my day!”

“One of the cameras in the back, I think the second set of routers linked through there,” Josh said, flipping through the cameras before Marcus could. Which was good, because he wasn’t focused on his laptop right now, too busy checking down the hallway and up on the upper deck, praying that no one had heard that exclamation. He was _so_ off his game right now.

There wasn’t a rush of booted feet and he couldn’t hear anyone yelling like he’d been caught. After a second, Marcus breathed out a sigh of relief and looked back down at his laptop, where Josh was cycling through cameras again. Looking for the other router, the one that kept getting lost in the noise of signals around the yacht. If Marcus could at least _physically_ locate it…

“Um,” Josh said, catching his attention again. Marcus shook himself out of his daze and looked back down at the screen, seeing first the router and then the thing that Josh was looking at.

Aiden Pearce, the Vigilante, hero of DedSec and all-around terrifying dude, pinned up against a wall with goddamn _Jordi’s_ tongue halfway down his throat. There were three bodies on the floor, one of them with a snapped neck and the other two oozing blood out of holes in their foreheads. The two living men in the room seemed completely oblivious to them.

“That’s…” Josh trailed off, the rapid clatter of keys under his fingers finally coming to a stuttering halt.

“You know what? I don’t have time to unpack this right now, so let’s just throw out the whole suitcase,” Marcus said, using Aiden’s phone as an access point to hit the router with. He wasn’t paying attention to the way Aiden’s fingers were buried in Jordi’s hair, or the way Jordi’s hands were rucking his legs up as he practically humped the dude against the wall. So much for dealing with Anton.

“Should we interrupt them?” Josh asked, sounding about as lost as Marcus felt right now. Thank _fuck_ he was not in a group call.

“Let me just—” On the cameras, Aiden broke the kiss, lifting his phone to glance at the message Marcus had sent. His lips quirked slightly, eyes finding the camera in the room, and then he said something too quiet for the electronics to pick up and pushed Jordi away. “Why don’t we just find Anton’s server room and then forget everything we saw tonight, Josh.”

“I’m making a bet with Wrench on this,” Josh said, quiet and intense. “I’m making a bet and then, when he finds out, he’ll have to pay up. I’m doing it in front of Sitara so she’ll make him.”

“Don’t you think that’s cheating?”

“It’s not cheating if you don’t get caught.” And then they were on the right camera for the server room, looking down on Anton as he drank and paid no attention to the carnage unfolding on his ship. The servers were there, but—

“I need hardline access,” Marcus groaned, mourning the loss of his drone more keenly than ever. Of course the super hacker would have his shit locked down. Why would he ever have anything less?

“Can you text Aiden Pearce again? His phone would be a good enough access point.” Josh’s fingers had picked up in speed again, setting up the hack and waiting for just the right moment to put it into place.

He opened his mouth to ask how Aiden was supposed to get in there, then paused with a frown as he saw a vent swing open. There was no way they’d gotten into a locked down safe room through the _vents_ , not when he’d seen them making out a bare few minutes ago. No way. And yet there Jordi was, falling into a silent crouch, stalking forward as Anton finally noticed something was wrong.

A leaner, darker shape dropped a second later, Aiden’s coat swirling around his knees as he bypassed the brutal violence unfolding on the floor and sat down at Anton’s desk. After a moment of digging in his pockets, he plugged one end of a wire into the desktop and the other into his phone.

“We have access,” Josh said. It was pointing out the obvious, but the screens blanked out a few seconds later, so Marcus didn’t hold it against him. If he just ignored the way Jordi was snapping a man’s neck a few feet away from the computers, he could almost pretend like this op had gone off smooth.

“Do we have the password?” Marcus watched as Sitara’s art blinked onto the screens, her favorite classical hits blaring over the speakers. In the desk chair, Aiden winced, standing up with one hand over his ear (must have been next to a speaker, whoops) and the other pointing towards the saferoom door, out of sight of the camera.

“Just a second. Yes. We’ve got it. I’m going to send this to some of our affiliates in the infosec community, let them distribute it to the hospitals. Better for our names to stay unattached to this.” And with that, Josh hung up on him. Had better things to do, probably.

Jesus, this was not going to be fun to explain to the rest of the crew.

The party was still raging on the main deck as he folded his laptop into his bag and checked the distance on the boat. A good couple of yards away from the yacht now, because they hadn’t tied it on and the drift had pulled it further and further as the current caught it. The bay was fucking _freezing_ , especially at night, and Marcus weighed the merits of trying to swim in it before turning and grabbing the ladder.

From the top deck, he’d be able to get a better idea of his escape options. He told himself that over and over again as he snuck across the oak floors of the second deck, ducking under windows and past doorways with a paranoid eye out for any remaining guards. Not that there were likely to be many of them.

He climbed the next ladder two rungs at a time, working his way towards the biggest stretch of space he could think of. There was the big, black shape of a helicopter squatting on the deck and he contemplated trying to put those sim games to the test when an annoying, familiar voice rang out behind him.

“What, not going to take the fall for us? Rude of you.” Jordi grinned at him, sliding past as he headed for the helicopter. “Whatever, we’ll drop you off somewhere and you can figure your own way down.”

“Man, fuck you,” Marcus muttered, climbing into the helicopter with no little amount of trepidation. This was how he was gonna die, a couple hundred feet in the air next to a maniac and Chicago’s most wanted.

“Drop us both off at the same place, Jordi,” Aiden said, buckling in next to him and showing him how the harness worked. “I’m sticking around for a while.”

“Dude, what?”

“ _Why_ do you hate me, Pearce?”

Aiden’s expression didn’t even twitch at the mingled protests, something like amusement settling on it instead. He was enjoying himself. The son of a bitch was having _fun_ tugging Jordi’s tail and then turning around to make that _Marcus’s_ problem. “I want to see how DedSec’s doing. It looks like you kids have something big planned, and I want to be at ground zero when it hits.”

“You’re serious,” Marcus said incredulously. First Ray, now _Aiden_?

“I’m serious,” Aiden agreed, lips twitching up slightly. “If your group doesn’t want me in your home base, that’s fine. I just want to see what you do next.”

Oh christ. Wrench was going to love this. _Josh_ was going to love this, and Marcus needed to remember to text him about that bet before Aiden walked through the front door of the games shop. He wasn’t so sure how Horatio and Sitara would react, much less Ray, but if it came to a vote, he was pretty sure the chips would fall in Aiden’s favor. Which meant DedSec had _two_ of Blume’s most wanted in their laps now.

“Ugh, fine, I’ll look at the fixer market around here,” Jordi groused, the rotors starting to drown him out. “You’re lucky I _like_ you, Pearce.”

Two of Blume’s most wanted and a pet murderer on top of it all. Things were about to get a lot more interesting around here.

Fuck.


End file.
